...two adults and... wow this gets complicated: One employed kid, one 4th year college kid, one Marine, and one college freshman.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Feeling Lonely

OK, I'm obviously contradicting myself here, but yes, one can feel lonely among friends. Actually, I think it has more to do with feeling like I'm coming down sick again. After crashing hard into a 3-hour nap yesterday afternoon, sleeping poorly last night and not being able to focus this morning, all I want to do is get these Motrin working on my pounding head and crawl into bed. But I'm still feeling lonely, which is weird. Weird. That's me. The gray rainy days aren't helping either. Perhaps St. Petersburg might not be a great Post for me, so here's hoping we don't get it.

It's probably not helping that I'm reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I'm not quite getting the book yet. A father and son (no names), are trudging about a devastated world, starving, freezing, avoiding groups that would eat them. Ash rains down night and day. Sporadic spoken sentences are usually no longer than 5 or 6 words, and often limited to 1 or 2 words. There are apparently no apostrophes is this dark world. After 2/3 of the novel, I'm still waiting for something to happen. Perhaps that is the point of the book, waiting for something when there is no history and no future. Trying to understand the will to live, the battle against death, when there is nothing to live for? Here's hoping the book group that gathers next month can enlighten me.

Need to brighten things up. What we need to do is have people over for an informal dinner. Time to pencil that in and see who's free and when.

I guess there's other news going on in the world. Let's see what's on my radar this week.

There's the Large Hadron Collider test going on right now. Leave it to Ian to lighten the idea of potential annihilation. Here's what he passed around the office today:"In my ongoing attempt to out myself as the biggest geek in the Consulate....Today scientists from CERN (CERN invented lots of cool stuff, like the World Wide Web) will switch on the "Large Hadron Collider," a 27 kilometer loop straddling the borders of Switzerland and France that will accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light, then smash them into each other. Apart from the inherent coolness of seeing fast things go boom, the scientists hope that the crashes will help them discover hidden particles, including "dark matter," that may explain the force of gravity.If you haven't already fallen asleep, this CERN employee rap video will explain the science. http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtMNow some people are trying to stop the experiment, worried that the collider will create tiny black holes that would obliterate space, time and our world.In the event that the collider destroys the universe, Thursday will be an admin day."Provided the universe does not implode, the election will continue. I realize that living outside the U.S. gives us an odd view of the world (from full-time stateside Americans who have never lived abroad), but I found the "Obama win preferred in world poll" article on news.bbc.co.uk quite fascinating. It states that a poll of 22,500 people in 22 foreign nations would prefer to have Obama as the next U.S. President, by a four-to-one margin. Obviously they don't get to vote and I'm sure there are plenty of Americans who would say "Who cares?" to what other nations would want in our election. But as someone who lives daily with others, on foreign soil surrounded by foreign press and foreign frustrations, it matters to me. It matters to me how our nation is considered around the world, it matters to me how our actual presence (yes, I mean us specifically and those like us in the State Department and military) is seen. The views of the rest of the world matter.And then there's the hurricane. Half a world away from us, yet always in our thoughts. It's been a tough year already for the U.S. and even moreso for the Caribbean nations. And to think we've only hit "I".

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The GlobeHoppers

For those wondering, Baghdad is 7 hours ahead of EDT.

We're a Foreign Service family currently posted to Frankfurt, Germany after having spent 2 years in Manila, Philippines, 1 year in Lome', Togo (no, not Tonga), 3 years in Chennai, India, 3 years in Virginia, and 4 years in Amman, Jordan. We'll spend 3 years in Germany to graduate the boys from high school, and our next post is Baghdad 2019!

I am a former Army brat (lived in Belgium, Zaire, Algeria, Niger, visited too many places to list), now Foreign Service spouse. I tag along where ever Ian takes us and try to keep the family sane. Between 1996 when we got married and 2003 when we moved to Manila we lived in Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, and Florida, and visited several other states.

Back to London again - November 2015 (grandma came too for the Dr. Who Festival)

South Ari Atoll, Maldives - May 20th Anniversary Trip 2016

Copenhagen, Denmark - March 2017

Antananarivo, Madagascar - March 2017

Johannesburg & Pretoria SA - March 2017

Berlin - May 21st Anniversary Trip 2017

Copenhagen (again) - October 2017 (with a lunch in Sweden)

Bruges - January 2018 (Christmas present!)

Wroclaw, Poland - October 2018

Copenhagen (again) - March 2019 (with an escape room in Sweden)

Rebecca traveled to Oman with chorus (2013), Ethiopia with Week Without Walls (WWW 2014), Qatar with swimming (2014) and volleyball (2015), and Kuwait with basketball (2016). She also went to Amsterdam in 2017 for a weekend.

Rebecca and Nicholas traveled through Vietnam on WWW 2015 and Thailand for WWW 2016.

Katherine went to Kuwait with volleyball (2014) and France with WWW 2014, and did a semester abroad in Cork, Ireland in 2016. She's was in Dublin for her internship summer 2017.

Jonathon went to Kuwait with Academic Games (2015) and had a school trip to Berlin (2016). He had a week of canoeing in Sweden in summer 2017, and a week of snowboarding in Austria in 2018.

Ian has been to Ethiopia (2006), Benin (2006), South Korea (2004), Liberia (2016), Central African Republic (2016), Cameroon (2016), Algeria (2017), Morocco (2017), Tunisia (2017), Turkmenistan (2017), Suriname (2018), Brunei (2018), Auckland NZ (2018). He also covers Sanaa and Tripoli (no travel there), Copenhagen and Accra. Ian aided after the Mumbai Massacre (2008), and also went to Bangalore and Hyderabad in India. A life goal for him is to serve in Russia or Canada, or really any place that has a decent hockey scene. He's happy that Frankfurt has the local Loewen team!